His father manufactured dresses, and his mother designed them. And once I’ve gotten that, once you get the idea of questions, then it’s quite easy to write.” “Isn’t it bliss? Don’t you approve?” “Once you get the notion of, ‘Isn’t it rich? Aren’t we schmucks not to be together?’ I mean, you get that tone, that takes a very short period of time.” “Send in the clowns.” Stephen Sondheim was born on March 22, 1930, to upper-middle-class parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. And if they’re going to be short phrases, what are better short phrases than questions? So the whole idea of, ‘Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair?’ Question, which ordinarily would not occur to me, came into my head. Glynis Johns could not sustain notes, so I thought, I got to write a song with short phrases. “Wrote it during rehearsals, brought it essentially overnight. “But where are the clowns? Quick, send in the clowns.” He wrote it specifically for Glynis Johns, one of the show’s stars, and it remains without a doubt his most popular and financially successful work. Which is, I’m sure, an exaggeration, but not much.” Sondheim wasn’t known for Top 40 hits, but one of his songs, “Send in the Clowns,” from “A Little Night Music,” rose to the top of the charts. If he was a geologist, I would have become a geologist. And he was a songwriter for the theater, so I became a songwriter for the theater. It was when I was 11 years old, I met Oscar Hammerstein, and he became a surrogate father, and I just wanted to do what he did. “What is it about the theater that attracted you so, that made you want to spend your career, your life working in it?” “It was very simple. If it doesn’t make you nervous, then you’re going to write the same thing you wrote before.” We sat down with him in June 2008 to talk about his own story and his accomplishments.
That’s one of the things that appeals to me about stories, is if I’ve never done anything like it before. “Will it be? Yes, it will.” In shows like “West Side Story,” “Gypsy,” “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Company,” “Follies,” “Sweeney Todd” and “Sunday in the Park With George,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, he created songs essential to the stories and changed the nature of the Broadway musical. “One of the first things you have to decide on with a musical is, why should there be songs? You can put songs in any story, but what I think you have to look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? If it’s unnecessary, then the show generally turns out to be not very good.” Composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was the most important figure in American musical theater of the last half-century. Transcript The Last Word: Stephen Sondheim In a never-before-seen interview, Stephen Sondheim sat down with The New York Times in June 2008 to talk about his life, career and accomplishments.
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